![]() ![]() Two of the volunteer brigades are set to assist the professional Polish army during Anaconda. Professional soldiers are particularly worried about a lack of clarity surrounding the creation and role of a 17-brigade territorial army, drawn in part from the 35,000 members of Poland’s gun clubs and paramilitary groups, some of which, it is feared, are linked to the country’s racist football hooligans. Insiders say morale has fallen to an all-time low since the appointment of Antoni Macierewicz as defence minister. So harsh have the cuts to the top brass been that the Polish armed forces recently found themselves unable to provide a general for Nato’s multinational command centre at Szczecin. The exercise comes at a sensitive time for Poland’s military, following the sacking or forced retirement of a quarter of the country’s generals since the nationalist Law and Justice government came to power in October last year. Last month, building work began on a similar missile interception base at Redzikowo, a village in northern Poland. It comes within weeks of the US switching on a powerful ballistic missile shield at Deveselu in Romania, as part of a “defence umbrella” that Washington says will stretch from Greenland to the Azores. The scope and numbers of Anaconda are no match for the Russian exercises that go on all the time just across the border.”īut Zaborowski also acknowledged that the backdrop to the exercise was “tense, and accidents can happen”.Īnaconda-2016 is a prelude to Nato’s summit in Warsaw on 8-9 July, which is expected to agree to position significant numbers of troops and equipment in Poland and the Baltic states. The defence needs of central and eastern Europe are real. Marcin Zaborowski, a Polish defence analyst at the Centre for European Policy Analysis in Warsaw, said: “In Poland we see the exercise as a reassurance measure from the US and Nato. Multinational operations publicised so far include an airdrop involving 1,130 parachutists over the northern Polish city of Toruń on Tuesday – including 500 US troops and 230 British ones – engineers building a bridge to carry 300 vehicles over the Vistula river and a night-time “assault” involving 35 helicopters. Managed by Poland’s Lt Gen Marek Tomaszycki, the exercise includes 14,000 US troops, 12,000 Polish troops, 800 from Britain and others from non-Nato countries. For the first time since the Nazi invasion of Soviet-occupied Poland began on 22 June 1941, German tanks will cross the country from west to east. It represents the biggest movement of foreign allied troops in Poland in peace time.
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